I was taken aback when Mr. Fancy Schmancy shouted "A pox on both your houses!" as I was unaware that he knew of my summer home. Founding member of the Hogtown Irregulars, and former indentured short order cook still on the run. Professional Zamboni racer and bronze medal recipient in the 2010 All-Miami Outdoor Zamboni Championships.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. - "Sarah Palin works fast. She instantly became the object of the kind of partisan hatred that most politicians can raise only after prosecuting an unpopular war and lying about their misconduct in office (Nixon), after making sanctimonious dishonesty an art form and getting caught in flagrante with an intern (Clinton), and after winning a disputed election and botching a foreign occupation (Bush).

Palin-hatred is an artifact of who she is rather than anything she's done. Joe Biden famously rose from the working class to the US Senate. Palin became governor of Alaska, but never left the working class - with her old-fashioned frumpy hairdo and librarian eyeglasses, with a husband who is a commercial fisherman and works on a North Shore oil field, and with her hobbies of fishing and hunting.

As such, she's the object of the cultural disdain of a left that loves the working class in theory, but is mystified or offended by its lifestyle and conservative values in reality. If there's ever been an exemplar of the rural America that, in Barack Obama's telling, "bitterly" clings to its guns and religion, it's Sarah Palin.

It's her misfortune to be a pioneer with the wrong ideology.

A popular liberal talk-radio host calls her a "bimbo," a Washington Post columnist compares her to Caligula's horse and the left-wing blogosphere goes on a demented jag about how her fifth son, Trig, is really the son of her 17-year-old daughter, Bristol. The lunacy forced the Palins to issue a statement that Bristol is pregnant, setting off a feeding frenzy from the same press that went out of its way to protect the privacy of John Edwards.

In a less poisonous atmosphere, Palin might have diminished the intensity of the "mommy wars Here were traditionalist conservatives hailing a very busy working mom with five kids, including a handicapped 4-month-old.

But the same feminists who ordinarily dismiss stay-at-home moms as benighted betrayers of the sisterhood now question whether Palin can juggle her family and political responsibilities.

Yes, it's heroic multi-tasking when a lefty does it and child abuse when a Conservative takes a crack at it. Just as they did with Clarence Thomas, liberals have swarmed to attack the very people they are supposed to be the sworn protectors of. Everything that can be said about the maniacal left already has been said, and in spades, but their double standard duplicity is Olympic in proportion and something quite amazing in modern times.

Communication, we are forever told and mostly by the lefties, brings people together and allows them to settle their differences amicably. Yet in a world inundated with chat our socialist brethren pull farther and farther afield as if the very proximity to traditional American values is too repugnant to withstand.